Story-Telling

Professor Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Joan W. Scott is Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is known internationally for writings that theorize gender as an analytic category. She is a leading figure in the emerging field of critical history.

Her ground-breaking work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history, and has contributed to a transformation of the field of intellectual history. Scott’s recent books focus on gender and democratic politics. They include Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005) , and The Politics of the Veil (2007).